"
It was forbidden to declare that no quarter would be given.
And here is the order of the day issued on August 25, 1914,
by General Stenger, commanding the Fifty-eighth German
Brigade, to his troops: "After today no more prisoners will
be taken. All prisoners are to be killed. Wounded, with or
without arms, are to be killed. Even prisoners already
grouped in convoys are to be killed. Let not a single living
enemy remain behind us."
It was forbidden to pillage a town or locality, even when
taken by assault. And on the corpse of the German private
Handschumacher (of the Eleventh Battalion of Jaegers,
Reserve) in the very earliest days of the war, was found the
following diary: "August 8, 1914. Gouvy (Belgium). There, as
the Belgians had fired on the German soldiers, we at once
pillaged the goods station. Some cases, eggs, shirts, and
all eatables were seized. The safe was gutted and the money
divided among the men. All securities were torn up."
In fact, pillage and robberies went on on such a high scale
during the first months of the war that considerable sums of
money were sent from France and Belgium to Germany. A German
newspaper, the _Berlin Tageblatt_, of November 26, 1914,
implicitly avowed it when, in a technical article on the
military treasury ("_Der Zahlmeister im Felde_"), it wrote:
"It is curious to note that far more money-orders are sent
from the theater of operations to the interior of the
country than _vice versa_.
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